2014/05/03

The "deep politics" concept has been coined by Pr. Peter Dale Scott. The first occurrence in a published work appeared year 1993.[1] In this book Scott coined the terms "deep political system" and his study as "deep political analysis" too.

The goal of this article is to synthesize the proposed definitions and those for associated concepts. The approach of deep politics is fundamental and essential for a better understanding of power legitimacy in the current political affairs. This announces the openness of a new and large field in political sciences, with an impact similar to the release of The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli.

With the rise since the second world war of socio-technical systems remained hidden from Parliament's control (like systems for mass surveillance of citizens) deep politics are in our view a comprehensive approach to how power acts -- from the design of the stakes up to the decision-making process -- that becomes much more relevant. Note however, that events caused by deep politics (deep events) have been identified since the Roman Republic. Thus its relevance is not limited to a certain American country in the XXI-st century. It is symbiotic of power, and valid at all times and in all places, to different degrees and different scales.

It is of paramount importance to civil society in each country to put a word defining this danger, which if it not managed can lead to the death of democracy.[2] If there is a word available to link a concept, then we can discuss this concept and study it as a tangible question, instead of an evanescent risk or a vague scare felt during a moonless night.[3] U.S. civil society has mastered this approach and has published more than 32.000 pages of studies since 1995 [4] in order to clarify in a comprehensive, consistent and public way all the details surrounding the death of JFK, that the American public state has refused to do for 50 years.

Some academic literature on State Crimes against Democracy (SCAD), that is to say, ultimately against citizens, exists but is still few in number.[5] This can be explained by the exceptional societal difficulty to publish on this subject since the 40s and by the fact that this literature comes in a second time to consolidate the theoretical contributions of numerous books and essays written by civil society (including scholars), retrospectively documenting SCAD in a historiographical way.[6]

In November 1996 [7] appeared in interviews and political studies the term "deep state", first within Turkey.[8] Démirel, former President of Turkey, has said: [9]

“There is one deep state and one other state, […]. The state that should be real is the spare one, the one that should be spare is the real one.”

Prime Minister Erdoğan also said: [10]

“Every state has its own deep state; it is like a virus; it reappears when conditions are suitable. We continue fighting these structures. We cannot of course argue that we have completely eliminated and destroyed it because as a politician, I do not believe that any state in the world has been able to do this completely.”

It is very significant to note that a related concept (the dual state) was proposed by Fraenkel in 1941 to characterize Nazi Germany.[11] He thought that the Nazi regime consisted in fact of two distinct states: a "normative" one and a "prerogative" one. In the first one administrative and judiciary bureaucracy acts according to rules; in the second one the Party, especially the Gestapo, act without any ultimate legal constraint. The prerogative state, of course, has in practice full power and can arbitrarily replace the normative state's actions in whole or part.

It is relevant to mention General MacArthur’s Cleveland speech of September 6, 1951 in the course of which the Mt. Vernon Register-News reported that :

[...] he cited the State Department as an example of what he called a "steady drift toward totalitarian rule." He said the department is assuming the character of a "prime ministry."[11b]

General Douglas MacArthur said Thrusday night he has noted a "steady drift toward totalitarian rule" and suppression of individual liberties in the United States.In a speech bristling with attacks on the Truman administration, he said that if the trend is not stopped, it could lead to a dictatorship."This drift has resulted in an increasingly dangerous paternalistic relationship between federal government and private citizens, with the mushrooming of agency after agency to control the individual," the general asserted.The speech, in which he said the administration's leaders are not to be trusted,... [11c]

The San Bernardino Sun reported :

His speech, latest in a series of major policy addresses, was devoted almost equally to domestic and foreign issues. It contained four central points :

1. That "our leaders" have lost the military victory gained in World war II, through a too rapid disarmament and diplomatic blunders, and that they can no longer be trusted now.

2. That the United Nations, as an organization, is "inherently weak," and is threatened with failure.

3. That the time may come when Japan may be "firmly established within the protective folds of our own cherished liberties, while we ourselves shall have lost them."

STEADY DRIFT NOTED

4. That since his return from the Orient, he has noted our "steady drift toward totalitarian rule with the suppression of those personal liberties which have formed the foundation stones to our political, economic and social advance to national greatness." MacArthur, amplifying the last point, went on to say: "If long countenanced by free men, it can but lead to those controls upon conviction and conscience which traditionally have formed stepping stones to dictatorial power." [11d]

In 1955 Morgenthau used the concept of dual state to characterize the United States.[12]O. Tunander summarized it: "There was on the one hand the regular democratic state hierarchy that acts according to the rule of law, and, on the other hand a more or less hidden security hierarchy, [...] that monitors and controls the former, or at least is able to "exert an effective veto over its decisions" to quote Morgenthau.

[...] In fact, this parallel security structure, [...] what some would call the "deep state", is the very apparatus that defines when and whether a "state of emergency" will emerge. This aspect of the state is what Carl Schmitt in his work Politische Theologie from 1922 qualifies as the "sovereign"." [12b,c]
We immediately note that the integration of the state of emergency is one of the key concepts on which the US deep state spent the last decades of the twentieth century.[13a] See below the distinction between Tunander and Scott about the exact meaning of the term 'deep state'.

"Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people.

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself.That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.

Both lessons hit home.

Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing."

December 23, 1913 the term "The Invisible Government" was used by Congressman Lindbergh in the Federal Reserve Act debate : "When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized." [13f] This term was used 1928 by Edward Bernays [13h] and again in the 60's. [13b]Pr. Antony C. Sutton also used it after 1972, but only with a focus on US foreign policy acted by the public state and the links with private firms (industries, banks, medias, think tanks). He did not explore the links with state agencies like CIA.

In 2014 in the context of the NSA scandal, Pr. Michael J. Glennon reused the "Double Government" theory, a term coined by Bagehot [13c], in his excellent sociological and constitutional study of the recent US administrations :

"National security policy in the United States has remained largely constant from the Bush Administration to the Obama Administration. This continuity can be explained by the “double government” theory of 19th-century scholar of the English Constitution Walter Bagehot. As applied to the United States, Bagehot’s theory suggests that U.S. national security policy is defined by the network of executive officials who manage the departments and agencies responsible for protecting U.S. national security and who, responding to structural incentives embedded in the U.S. political system, operate largely removed from public view and from constitutional constraints."

Glennon also mentioned the term "deep structure" used by H. Heclo in 1999 but this one was limited to describing "those elements that remain the same when the administration changes." [13d]

Glennon did not study the illegal and covert actions by the deep state like Scott has done. But we can note these sentences, p. 99 :

"Inspectors general were set up within federal departments and agencies in 1978 as safeguards against waste, fraud, abuse, and illegality, but the positions have remained vacant for years in some of the government’s largest cabinet agencies, including the departments of Defense, State, Interior, and Homeland Security.[...]

The CIA’s Office of Inspector General “has generally produced better results when addressing discrete, isolated problems,” but “when the largest problems surfaced, the statutory OIG did not add significant remedial value”;

When it was Dana Priest who broke The Washington Post story about secret CIA prisons—prisons that OIG had not investigated before the story— it leads to the conclusion that intelligence insiders deem Ms. Priest (or Mr. Risen, or Mr. Lichtblau, or Mr. Pincus, or any other investigative reporter) a more effective agent of change than OIG. And not only did the whistleblower choose Ms. Priest either instead of, or in addition to, OIG, he or she did so despite the risk of being disciplined, discharged, or even arrested for disclosing secrets to a reporter.”

"[There exists] a shadowy Government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself." [13g]

We used the term deep statein 2012 into a chronological description of U.S. political events during the last century [14] in acknowledgment of Scott's work, who used it himself since 2007.[15]

Today the deep state is the term mostly used in mainstream media [16] but its explanation remains very simplistic and often confusing.

Definitions and meanings

Scott's works offer the most comprehensive contribution, and historically make reference.

About parapolitics [17]and the relations with deep politics: [18]

"...the investigation of parapolitics, which I defined (with the CIA in mind) as a `system or practice of politics in which accountability is consciously diminished.'...I still see value in this definition and mode of analysis. But parapolitics as thus defined is itself too narrowly conscious and intentional... it describes at best only an intervening layer of the irrationality under our political culture's rational surface. Thus I now refer to parapolitics as only one manifestation of deep politics, all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged."

About the deep political system and its analysis :

“A deep political system or process is one which habitually resorts to decision-making and enforcement procedures outside as well as inside those publicly sanctioned by law and society. In popular terms, collusive secrecy and law-breaking are part of how the deep political system works. […]

Deep political analysis focuses on the usually ignored mechanics of accommodation. From the viewpoint of conventional political science, law enforcement and the underworld are opposed to each other, the former struggling to gain control of the latter. A deep political analysis notes that in practice these efforts at control lead to the use of criminal informants; and this practice, continued over a long period of time, turns informants into double agents with status within the police as well as the mob. The protection of informants and their crimes encourages favors, payoffs, and eventually systemic corruption […] where the controlling hand may be more with the mob than with the police department it has now corrupted.”[19]

It is important to understand that this mechanism has no limit of dissemination in the political system: in 1985 the CIA director and ex-FBI director testified in favor of Jacquie Press (a member of Reagan presidential team and also one of the leaders of the Teamsters mob) stating that his illegal activities had been authorized. [20]

“A deep political analysis enlarges traditional structuralist analysis to include indeterminacies analogous to those which are studied in chaos theory. A deep political system is one where the processes openly acknowledged are not always securely in control, precisely because of their accommodation to unsanctioned sources of violence, through arrangements not openly acknowledged and reviewed.”[21]

About the deep state and the relations with the public state :

According to Scott, the political organization in a country « correspond to two overlapping systems of statal institutions: the deep state and the public state. The second interacts with and is responsive to civil society, especially in a democracy; the first is immune to shifts in public opinion.

Thus the deep state is expanded by covert operations; the public state is reduced by them. Following the same distinction as Hans Morgenthau in his discussion of the dual state, Ola Tunander talks of a “democratic state” and a “security state.” His definitions focus more on the respective institutions of the dual state; mine, on their social grounding and relationship to the power of the "overworld" » [that is to say the realm of wealthy or privileged society that, although not formally authorized or institutionalized, is the scene of successful influence of government by private power].

« Deep state and security state are not quite identical. By the deep state I mean agencies like CIA, with little or no significant public constituency outside of government. By the security state, I mean above all the military, an organization large enough to have a limited constituency and even in certain regions to constitute an element of local civil society. The two respond to different segments of the overworld and thus sometimes compete with each other. »

« Archival history is a chronological record of events, as reconstructed by archival historians from public records; as opposed to deep history, which is a chronology of events concerning which the public records are often either falsified or nonexistent. » [22]

About influence and geopolitical strategies, the main difference between a public state and a deep state is that the latter is not limited to agreed frontiers and to its embassies. It is present where lies and moves each of his pieces. Collusion with trans-national companies and organizations (NGOs, but also relay antennas within institutions) gives it momentum. P.D. Scott has called this thesupranational deep state. [23]

P.D. Scott summarized his fundamental ideas on deep politics in this video :

[1] “Deep Politics and the Death of JFK”, Peter Dale Scott, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Scott explained (pp. vii) this book was written from two manuscripts released in 1971 and 79.

[3] I published this article 3/15/2014 in a period when the non elected leaders of European Commission force all EU citizens to take commitments in a fast track mode without following regular processes, that are opposed to what the EU people wish: integration of Ukraine into EU, signature of TTIP agreement with the US, and soon new laws restricting liberties because supposedly « the EU is not any more in security and must do everything possible to protect herself from Russia ». Think about it when you will count the NATO boots in your streets. (Update 5/3/2014: for instance read this published 4/24/2014).

[5]a) in “Government of the shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty”, Dr Eric Wilson, éditeur, 2009, London: Pluto Press (A copy of O. Tulander's article is here); b) Six articles published in American Behavioral Scientist, February 2010; 53 (6) ; See a copy of the article written by L. deHaven-Smith here to separate and distinguish between SCAD and what is called "conspiracy theory" ; c) in « The Dual State - Parapolitics, Carl Schmitt and the National Security Complex », Dr Eric Wilson, Ed., 2012, Ashgate Publishing Ltd.

[11] “The Dual State. A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship”, Ernst Fraenkel, translation from the German by E. A. Shils, in collaboration with Edith Lowenstein and Klaus Knorr, Oxford University Press, New York, 1941 ; Fraenkel lived in the U.S. starting 1939 and worked for Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and US government between 1942 and 1951, and closely with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a predecessor of the CIA -- as explained by Gerhard Göhler, Dirk Rüdiger Schumann: Vorwort zu diesem Band, in: Ernst Fraenkel. Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3, Neuaufbau der Demokratie in Deutschland und Korea, Baden-Baden 1999, Pp 9–49. The US government has then paid for his return back in Germany. This could explain why he described only positively the US political system in his 1960 book titled « Das amerikanische Regierungssystem ».

[12b] "Dual State: The Case of Sweden", Ola Tunander, in Eric Wilson, ed., "The Dual State: Parapolitics, Carl Schmitt and the National Security Complex", Ashgate, 2012, pp 171–192.[12c] "Securitization, Dual State and US-European Geopolitical Divide or The Use of Terrorism to Construct World Order", Ola Tunander, Fifth Pan-European International Relations Conference, The Hague, 9-11 September 2004.

[13a] See the chapter about Continuity of Government (COG) in "The road to 9/11 - Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America", Peter Dale Scott, University of California Press, 2007.[13b]"There are two governments in the United States today. One is visible. The other is invisible. The first is the government that citizens read about in their newspapers and children study about in their civics class. The second is the interlocking, hidden machinery that carries out the policies of the United States in the Cold War. The second invisible government gathers intelligence, conducts espionage and plans and executes secret operations all over the globe." (David Wise, Thomas B. Ross, 'The Invisible Government', Random House, 1964) ; Quoted by J. Kuzmarov.[13c] Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, 1867.[13d] Michael J. Glennon, "National Security and Double Government", Harvard National Security Journal, Vol. 5, 2014, Pp 1-114. A short review can be found here.[13e] F.D. Roosevelt, "Message to Congress on Curbing Monopolies", April 29, 1938.[13f] Speech before the House of Representatives by C.A. Lindbergh (1859-1924), December 22, 1913, Congressional Record, Vol. 51, p. 1446.[13g] Speech before the Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition, 1987.[13h] "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized." (Edward Bernays, "Propaganda", 1928, Pp. 37).

Doublethink is shortly characterized by an inversion of logic. The victim is targeted as being the aggressor, etc. It is easy to replace things in the correct order when you know that. This is thus what I’ve decided to perform with Foxall’s article, keeping as much as possible close to the original sentences for demonstration purpose, and updating links.
A second factor was the relevant mention of the central role of the civil society in the liberation process, what I called in French “peupler l’espoir” in a footnote of the previous part of this serie ('The inevitable counter-revolution of the American people'). P.D. Scott has written about this role too.[1b]

The only order that is really worth anything does not come through the enforcement [...] of law, it comes through the establishment of a society which is just and in which harmonious relationships are established and in which you need a minimum of regulation to create decent sets of arrangements among people. But the order based on law and on the force of law is the order of the totalitarian state, and it inevitably leads either to total injustice or to rebellion-eventually.

Kicking the deep state off the U.S. land

The deep state has directly or indirectly ruled the U.S. since 1963. And, after 50 years in power, there are few signs that he will abdicate his position anytime soon. Using the voice of Hillary Clinton, the deep state has stated it may seek re-election in 2016, meaning he would rule until 2020 -- by which time it will rule since 57 years.

No tyranny, however, lasts forever -- Hitler's 1,000-year Reich lasted all of 12 years -- and it is in this context that we should view the deep state's rule. Its power is not what it once was: The social contract it implicitly built with the American people in his earlier years -- he could do whatever he liked, as long as life improved for many of them -- is broken. High rates of economic growth are long gone, and so too is the increasing standard of living that they provided. Americans are becoming restless and, although the opposition congressmen as a whole are cowed and quiet (with a very few exceptions), opposition movement have performed well in recent election polls. The deep state resorted to destabilizing Ukraine (at least, in part) to boost its falling approval ratings, which are now record low.

While many U.S.-watchers cannot imagine the country without the deep state at the helm, it's time for leaders to start. In confronting a moribund, revanchist transnational deep state, the world must have a clear vision of the ideal post-deep state America.

In a lot of ways, Obama was an unlikely president. As the first African-American President of the United States, his race and culture have played a prominent role in this, both positively and negatively. His relative youth (47 when elected) has alternately resulted in his being praised for his freshness and criticized for his inexperience. His temperament and demeanor have drawn praise for his perceived unflappability and criticism for the perception of his lacking emotional attachment. [2] When G.W. Bush stepped down on January 2009, Obama became acting president. One of his first acts was to order the first two Predator airstrikes of his presidency in Pakistan. The Guardian described the deep state recently as having "brought darkness to America," but, driven and certain of his own staying power, it ascended without hesitation. It hasn't looked back since its inception.

Up to 1963, the U.S. had the potential to develop along a liberal-democratic path. The country was a multiparty democracy in which officials were chosen in regular elections; its fledgling economy was based on markets and private property, and its media independent and pluralistic. Starting 1989, the Russian military withdrew peacefully from Eastern Europe and the Soviet successor states, pursued cooperation with the West on nuclear disarmament, although Russia was forced to accept the expansion of NATO. To be sure, serious issues remained (not the least of which, U.S. deep state above the legal system and its pervasive nature of organized crime), but the country was headed in a promising direction when its government strongly reduced deficits and curbed debt. U.S. President Bill Clinton described this period as "a time of real possibility and opportunity."

Except with the visible growing inequality, nowhere is the deep state's impact on U.S. as visible as in the country's political sphere. Since the 1963 parliamentary elections - the last before JFK was killed – the two parties are increasingly polarized. In the most recent parliamentary elections, in 2013, polarization in the House and Senate is at the highest level since the end of Reconstruction.

Sanctions should become the status quo, and they should go further than visa bans and asset freezes, to include asset seizures. Given the choice between siding with the deep state and protecting some of their vast wealth stored in others capitals and financial centers, enough of them will go with the latter.

The friction and resentment that this creates will demonstrate the growing fissures within the deep state -- over what is needed to improve U.S. economy, what direction the country is headed, and whether international isolation is sensible -- and may even lead to U.S. citizens deciding the country needs new leadership. This would make clear to the next generation of politicians, policymakers, and businessmen that being associated with the deep state and his system comes with a price.

If the world is going to uproot the deep state, it must remember that past successes employed more subtle strategic campaigns. The West likes to say to have won the Cold War because of the superiority of capitalism over Soviet communism, but one of the most subversive -- and effective -- acts it undertook was to offer visas to Soviet students as part of "cultural exchange" programs. In doing so, the students were exposed to the West's democratic and liberal values and took these back to germinate in the Motherland. When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's twin reformist policies of glasnost ("openness") and perestroika ("restructuring") took hold, Soviet citizens were equipped to take advantage. In the words of one U.S. foreign service officer involved in these programs, those citizens "came, they saw, they were conquered, and the Soviet Union would never again be the same."

Now, once again, all countries should liberalize their visa regimes with the West, rather than follow the European Union's lead in freezing talks on a visa-free regime. This will make it easier for the next generation of U.S. decision-makers to expose themselves to liberal-democratic values and, as a result, they will be far better prepared when the deep state leaves power.

Offering cultural exchanges may seem like a long-term program, but in the short-term the West could pay more attention to countering the deep state's increasingly anti-Russia propaganda in the West. Across the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe broadcasts were an important alternative to the Kremlin's communication. Now, because the Western leaders are reviving a Cold War thinking, all countries must provide money, expertise, technology, and support for English and Spanish-language broadcasting in America. This would meet the deep state's propaganda head-on, and begin to drive out bad information with good. It would send a clear message that the world is not going to give up on the U.S. deep state just yet.

It is not possible to turn the clock back to a pre-deep state era, but that doesn't mean the world should consign the U.S. to the dustbin of history. Despite what political scientists might claim, it is not inevitable that the post-deep state U.S. will be fascist again. Although politicians are embattled and less prominent than they used to be, there are still capacity to take offense in the U.S.. Even the Soviet Union's Politburo was not as monolithic as many assumed. Whether the end of the deep state's rule is evolutionary or revolutionary, the world must be clear about how it hopes to see U.S. develop; it must be willing to put long-term strategic objectives over short-term economic interests.

The deep state might be influencing Western governments to flex their military muscles in Ukraine and demonstrating their steely indifference to political demands from the citizens, but in the end it is the others governments and civil society, and not the transnational deep state, who could ultimately determine U.S.'s future.

___________________

[1] As Georges Orwell defined it in his book 1984: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.[...]

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”

[1b] Peter Dale Scott ; see also his conclusion chapter in "Road to 9/11 - Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America”, Peter Dale Scott, University of California Press, 2007.